Descartes v Locke: An Epistemological Wrestling Match

Descartesʼ attempts to ground an epistemology are, for

him, successful as any knowledge that builds on the certainty

of the ʻcogitoʼ can be considered as foundational.

Having established beyond any scepticism the certainty of

his existence as a thinking thing, Descartes can claim epistemological grounds for his subsequent ideas about the nature of the physical world that he perceives through his senses, but knows and understands through his faculty of

Reason. 

However, Descartes claims rest on his ‘innate idea’ of a perfect God, that would not allow him to be deceived all the time; without this God, he can only claim with certainty that he is thinking; he cannot make any claim about the truth or certainty of the content of any of his thoughts unless he can establish the ‘fact’ that he is not being deceived by an evil demon. And he can only do that through his ‘innate’ idea of God. 

So, when John Locke, some 50 years later, rejects the possibility of innate ideas he is clearly attacking Descartesʼ claim that he has ‘grounded’ or proved the validity of his knowledge of the world (his epistemology)  For Locke the mind is a

blank slate - a tabula rasa, and all the ideas, all the knowledge that we come to possess comes to us through our senses.

This dispute sets up a philosophical debate that has, in various forms, rumbled on into contemporary philosophy. The argument can be summed up in basic terms as a dispute about how the kinds of things that seem to go on inside our heads relate to the kinds of things that seem to go on outside our heads. Does our ‘knowledge’ represent the world accurately? Is the world really how we think it is? 

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